


The Nightmare Arc

by Metagenesis



Category: World of Warcraft
Genre: Blood Elves, F/M, Gen, Original Character(s), Originally Posted on Tumblr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-07
Updated: 2017-11-07
Packaged: 2019-01-30 15:40:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 17,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12656481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Metagenesis/pseuds/Metagenesis
Summary: Illapa Greybane must enter the Emerald Nightmare in order to save his beloved priestess. To do so, he must enlist the aid of his own personal monster: the Scion of the Unseen, an eldritch hybrid of his own making.





	1. Prologue / I

**Author's Note:**

> This arc was co-authored by Solarine's writer. You can find our character tumblrs at:  
> http://illapa-greybane.tumblr.com  
> http://solarine.tumblr.com
> 
> Since these are original characters with a lot of history, some elements of this story may be unfamiliar to new readers. Hopefully the greater structure of the work will prove enjoyable nonetheless.
> 
> While the characters portrayed are in an intimate relationship, this work features no sex, but does feature gore and horror themes.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alternate chapter title: Illapa Threatens to Break Up with his Monster Boyfriend

 

 

> Nightmare corruption doesn’t seem to have any boundaries to who it can corrupt, as it has taken hold of powerful mortals, demigods, and even demons. When a mortal has become corrupted by the nightmare, there is no return; only death will set them free. Once cursed, the nightmare will begin consuming the victim’s thoughts and filling their head with the voices of other corrupted beings, even the nearby flora. The curse itself, however, is known to make the victims very, very powerful, rivaling even that of the ancients.
> 
> – [Emerald Nightmare, Wowpedia](http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fwow.gamepedia.com%2FEmerald_Nightmare&t=NzNmOTQyMDM2ZDAyY2ZjZTk1ZDM4ZWYzMDlkNjhkN2ZhZWZmYjgwZiw4QWdqMlIxbA%3D%3D&b=t%3ANa0hCK-1Qqehagb-bsBFng&p=http%3A%2F%2Fillapa-greybane.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F160054595136%2Fthe-nightmare-arc-prologue&m=1)

For several months, Illapa Greybane and Solarine Fairlight have been studying the Nightmare: the corruption which has taken root at the world tree Shaladrassil in Val’sharah. In addition to various field work and expeditions into the corrupted forests, they had also collected samples from contaminated flora and fauna to be examined in a laboratory setting in Dalaran.

Their investigation was promising. However, despite rigorous safety protocols, an accident led to free exposure of Nightmare-contaminated material in the lab. Decontamination measures were immediately put into effect, and after neutralizing the material with caustic cleansers, purifying magic, and a new layer of concrete on the laboratory floor, no adverse effects were observed in the weeks following the incident.

Until, one night, Solarine began to whisper in her sleep. At first, it seemed like nothing more than the usual nightmares both she and Illapa were accustomed to; by the time the nightmares escalated to a half-sleeping, half-waking delirium, it was too late. Solarine was in the grip of the Nightmare, while her Light-infused body threatened to burn itself alive in a futile attempt to fight the corruption.

It became very clear that if the Nightmare did not consume her entirely, then the fever racing through her would kill her instead.

In her one moment of clarity before succumbing entirely to delirium, Solarine had one entreaty:  
  
_Find the Scion._

* * *

 

He stood at the edge of the sky-temple, gazing down at the snowcapped peaks of mountains below. He felt curiously still, curiously calm – perhaps a product of fatigue or the thinness of the cold air that tugged at the tails of his coat. But this seemed the most likely place for their meeting, here where they had first stood together sharing the same skin and terrible purpose.

The Faceless plot had been undone and Their power ripped away from Their avatars, but  _something_ had remained within Illapa Greybane, some trace of the monster he had too briefly become. Unable to coexist, he had instead loosed it upon the world to wander alone, a strange hybrid creature bearing his face.

Perhaps more than that. Perhaps a part of his soul had gone with it and lay between its beating hearts. He had no way to tell, and in all honesty, he was not sure he would care if it had.

His presence here, in the place of their defeat, would resonate like a beacon down the link he felt, on some level, they still shared. This was their origin point, the point where their identities converged.

“Do you remember?” he found himself saying into the thin air, his breath misting at his lips. “Seeing through a thousand eyes. The visions and the voices. The song. The dream.”

“We remember,” he was not surprised to hear as the Scion rounded one of the temple’s marble columns, still marked with a blackened scar where the original Cluckinator had met its tragic end. The being towered above even Illapa, though it moved with a gaunt grace despite its stature. One of its hands moved with what seemed like nostalgia over the damaged column, and Illapa had to fight a wave of vertigo as he felt suddenly pulled out of his body, adrift and confused, seeing himself standing over there–

No. Not himself. The Avatar had fallen, and they were two now. He clenched one gloved hand into a fist, using the faint creak of thin leather between his fingers to anchor himself in his body, his mind.

He had to be sharp. He was about to make a deal with a monster.

“We had not anticipated the unbidden arrival of Our mortal aspect to this place,” the Scion continued, moving in an oblique half-circle around Illapa, keeping its distance for now – but every one of its slow, gliding steps brought it gradually closer. “Have you come to reclaim the mantle of your power, Our Eyes?”

“We both know that is beyond your power to grant, diminished as you are,” Illapa returned. The Scion bowed its blind head gracefully in acquiesence. “I would not have come at all if there was not a matter of great urgency.”

“And what is it that compels you to beg Our counsel?”

A pause for breath, the air sharp in his nose and lungs. “You first reached out through the realm of dreams. Could you do it again?”

Stalking steps. “It is possible.”

“What about nightmare?”

“Even moreso.”

“What about  _Nightmare_?” he asked, and the creature paused at the nuance in his voice.

“You wish to commune with the Corruptor’s Nightmare?”

“I need you to take me there.” The Scion’s face was difficult to read, its expressions subtle and lacking the tells of the eyes, but he thought it looked intrigued. Pleased.

“We could indeed part the veil that separates this world from its Dream. We could take you across. We could do this for you. But Our question remains – for what reason do you seek this from Us?”

“There is a corruption spreading through this world, though its roots lie not here, but within the Dream. I intend to cut it out at its source.”

The gaunt shoulders rolled, four arms making simultaneous, indifferent gestures, four red eyes gleaming in its hands. “This is not a goal with which We are inclined to assist. We have no reason to cross–”

“No,” Illapa interrupted, and the frigid bite to his voice gained even the monster’s attention. “You misunderstand me. This is not a negotiation. This is not about your reasons to do so. This is about what will happen if you do  _not_.”

He stepped closer, into the fall of its eight-foot shadow, into the purvey of all of those eyes. “The Nightmare has Solarine. If you do not do as I require, if she succumbs to death or abomination, then you will lose the one being on this entire miserable world who thinks at all kindly of you. If you do not do as I require, if I lose her… I will not hunt you down. I will not exact my considerable vengeance. I will cut you off. I will cast you out. I will sever the last remnant of the link between us, and you will be truly isolated on this mortal world, bereft of both sides of your abominable heritage, utterly and uniquely alone.”

_Alone._

The monster had, until its rebirth into the mortal realm, in the bowels of an ancient Mogu stronghold, never considered that word. There was no meaning to loneliness in a world where there were a thousand other voices speaking in unison. Never had it truly been alone, even when the place it had dwelled was a closed-off part of a mind only vaguely aware of its continued existence. After all, Solarine had occasionally come to visit there, offering to it the only possible chance it would ever have of freedom and salvation.

Two voices, two sets of thoughts along with its own, and even then only so very briefly. The silence was deafening, strange and empty, enough so that even an eldritch monster from the planes beyond reality could understand the insanity brought by spending eternity with only the maddening whispers of one’s own thoughts. Alone.

“We… desire further knowledge of the circumstances,” it finally spoke in its oddly familiar and yet strangely alien tone. Long, ivory hair fluttered about the otherwise still figure, swept by an icy wind that suddenly gusted past and through the ancient temple that still bore the scars of the climactic battle years prior.

“Our Beloved has fallen into the Nightmare, but from where has the corruption sprung forth? Did she encounter it unwittingly?” The monster tilted its eyeless head, a birdlike or perhaps insectoid gesture. “Or, perhaps, of her own volition? We are aware her curiosity of Our realms might someday rival that of your own, Our Eyes.”

“It was… it was an accident,” Illapa clarified. “We have been studying the nature of the Nightmare, she and I, and that is how she was exposed. Now the corruption assaults her body and her mind. We both know that it cannot be cleansed nor cured, not while the heart of the corruption still thrives within the Dream.”

Illapa’s ears pinned back slightly as he watched the Scion while it processed the information it had received.  _Our_ beloved? He set aside the surge of venom at hearing the monster refer to Solarine as such. So it felt affection, or something like it. Was it something it had inherited from himself, or was the tenderness all its own?

It did not matter either way. He could puzzle out its nature later. For now, that affection was something he could  _use_.

If the Scion understood the slight but important movement of Illapa’s ears, or the momentary hardening of his angular features, it gave no sign. It barely reacted at all, really, as its mortal counterpart further explained the problem.

It turned its eyeless face into the wind, and the sleet pellets the gust carried pattered against its hardened flesh with an audible  _tick tick tick_.

Then the Scion’s eyes, every one of them, fixated upon Illapa even as the monster’s face remained turned away.

“Such a careless mistake cannot be so easily remedied,” it finally told Illapa. “However, We are… motivated… to offer Our assistance. The veil that will be crossed is no place for mortals, but there is a chance she may be retrieved if the Nightmare has not completely taken hold.”

“Then we must act swiftly.”  _Careless_ , his thoughts echoed the Scion’s words, but he had no time,  _no time_. He would have to trust in his ability to plan and predict and adapt to the unknown. And he would have to trust that the Scion’s  _motivations_ did not waver.

Trust the Scion. Of course not. The monster had not remarked on the very remarkable knife deliberately hidden on his person, so it would be his failsafe against treachery.

Assuming, of course, that he could bring himself to plunge the knife into his counterpart – but Illapa Greybane was terribly  _motivated_ as well.

In response to Illapa’s urgings of swift action, the Scion canted its head and turned two of its eye-hands outward, facing Ulduar, then tilted them slightly upward toward the sky, where a dim arctic sun hung low over the horizon, even though it was only early afternoon. A traveler passed in the far distance, too far for them to notice what was happening atop the temple, but other Eyes tracked the laden gryphon’s progress through the sky until it disappeared over a mountaintop.

“We must go to her now,” it stated. “Her soft flesh will not withstand the journey here any more than her spirit will survive the Nightmare. Bring her to the base of the great tree which harbors the corrupted Dream. We must prepare.”

There was no argument or debate invited or even possible. As it finished speaking, space itself began to warp the frigid air just in front of the Scion. Without even a word of parting, much less any sort of explanation, the monster caught a small handful of sleet and stepped through into the void.


	2. II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Scion's Super Happy Fun Time in the Nightmare Forest

If Illapa thought it would be difficult to find the Scion beneath the boughs of the world-tree, he was mistaken. Perhaps it was a product of their physical meeting strengthening some latent bond between them, for he found his steps placed with unerring purpose as he made his way through the nightmarish forest.

The trail of corpses also helped.

It began as a few splashes of blood, hardly out of place in a forest where living nightmares had taken root. But the splashes turned to signs of struggle, broken branches and matted grass where things had been dragged further into the woods. Piles of steaming offal. Bodies and pieces of bodies. He stepped between the halves of a corrupted dryad, carefully stepping over the thin bit of viscera that stretched between her humanoid torso and her doe-like body – not severed, but torn apart.

That was only the start of the gorey tableau that he followed, carrying the insensate priestess in his arms. He had swaddled her tightly to restrain her fitful movements, but he could do nothing to silence the rasping sounds she made as she mouthed nearly-silent words through a raw throat and cracked lips.

A thousand mindless eyes stared at them from fungal-like masses. The ground was unnervingly soft and sucked at the soles of his boots. The dense forest twined blackened, tumor-laden branches around them as it led them in twisted, labyrinthine paths until he felt like an invading body being swept along the branching veins of a massive, corrupt organism.

But he followed the gruesome path the Scion had laid, and he followed the strange sensation that seemed to reach into his chest and wrap stiletto-pointed fingers around his heart.

Until finally, the twisted forest gave way to the gnarled roots of the world-tree. They, too, pulsed with corruption, columns of gnarled wood larger than the most ancient of trees in the forest. It was those roots which had sunk deep into Azeroth’s crust, touching the subterranean prisons of the Old Gods and wicking up their demented dreams. He craned his head back, but so vast was the tree that he could only get a sense of its shape, the massive trunk and the sky-high branches draped with hanging moss, the whole thing a vast and distant  _presence_ of great age and dark wood that blotted out the sky.

Between a junction of those massive roots the Scion waited, gleaming ivory against the cavernous dark of the nightmare forest, its once-pristine skin streaked with blood and fluids fouler still. All around it lay dismembered limbs and parts of what used to be satyrs, dryads, and grove keepers; to an untrained eye, the placement seemed haphazard, the parts speared on broken branches merely the product of a deranged mind. But he saw immediately the shapes the crooked limbs had been bent to form, the placement and spacing of the wet bones and steaming organs. His skin crawled with the latent power of all those recent deaths heavy in the air.

No wonder he had not immediately noticed the still-living satyr which the Scion had in its hands, two sets of dagger-like fingertips sunk into the meat of its crimson-furred shoulders, two others wrapped around its curling horns.

“Your arrival is timely, Our mortal aspect. We trust the way remained cleared for you.”

Before he could speak, the Scion’s four arms tensed and pulled; the satyr gave a bleating shriek until a series of meaty pops silenced it as the monster rapidly dislocated all of its cervical vertebrae. It fell to the ground heavily when the fingertips spearing it withdrew and the Scion stepped forward, as nonchalant as if it had been carving a feastday turkey.

“Come, bring her to Us. We have read the signs written in the bodies of the Corruptor’s servants, and this is where we shall make our crossing.”

Solarine was unconscious, curled limply against Illapa’s chest as he carried her along. Despite the lack of conscious acknowledgement by the nearly-comatose Priestess, her form and figure itself told a wretched story, readable even by almost the most illiterate of eyes. Her skin, already pale as milk, had a sickly, sallow cast to it. Her hair clung in damp clumps to her sweat-beaded skin, and now…

Now, with only hours having passed between Illapa’s departure and the joint arrival at Shala'drassil, the corruption had spread. Angry, nightmarish red had begun to crawl its way up Solarine’s leg, from what was now a festering, eyeball-shaped blister upon her ankle. If and when the blister popped, it would become a truly nightmarish scenario, as this would expose all present to what would – for a mortal, at least – be an extremely hazardous and scarcely avoidable amount of infected material.

The skin around her ankle looked almost maroon, wherever it touched or came close to that vile, eyeball-like blister. Was it corruption, or was it the early stages of gangrene?

Not that either was a more favorable possibility than the other.

As bidden, Illapa stepped gingerly across the blood-soaked grass, moving with great care so to not jostle the unconscious priestess’ dangling limbs. If that festering blister ruptured, they would both be beyond help.

The Scion loomed over them, its blind face almost beatific as it raised one hand to Solarine’s wan face. “Her body sickens, but her spirit struggles in the Nightmare’s grasp. Share your burden with Us, Our Eyes. We must make the crossing before it takes her beyond our reach.”

Illapa tensed as two of the Scion’s arms curled beneath Solarine’s limp form, as though to take the priestess from his hold. The Scion might have felt something like affection for her – but it was still a monster, and that did not change its nature, nor make its emotions benevolent or benign.

But it did not take her, merely stood with him, mortal and inhuman arms both cradling the corrupted priestess between them.

“Be wary on the other side, Our mortal aspect. The Nightmare devours, and the Nightmare deceives even the keenest of Eyes. You have no dominion there – and We, very little. We will do what We are able to keep it at bay while you seek out her struggling spirit.”

Illapa gazed up at the smooth, eyeless face of his counterpart. Every part of his rational, analytical mind screamed at him that this was a mistake, that he was rushing carelessly and unprepared into the unknown for the sake of a doomed cause and with nothing but a treacherous ally at his side.

But the Nightmare fed on doubt and torment, and so he forced himself to put those misgivings aside, to leave them here in the waking world and take with him only certainty. He was not walking blind into the abyss, merely escalating a plan for which he had been laying the groundwork over months prior. He was not unprepared. And he was not unarmed.

He nodded, once, and he thought he saw the reflection of his mouth curve in the slightest smile as the Scion spread its two unburdened arms, the crimson eyes set into their palms the exact same shade as the pulsing tumors bulging on the branches of the trees, as the dead satyr’s mantle of fur, as the thousand eyes staring out from the nightmarish forest.

The Scion raised its arms, a slow, sweeping motion. The air seemed to thicken and ripple like waves of desert heat, turning their still surroundings into a vista of constant, nauseating motion. Lurid fog began to creep at the edges of his vision, and he could not discern whether it was real or illusion, a trick of the brain. Pressure built in his ear canals, muffling the ambient sounds of the forest. His pulse throbbed in his temples and behind his eyes. His vision dimmed as the fog pressed in, and he stumbled as his sense of equilibrium faltered.

He put out his arms to catch himself. His arms were empty. Solarine was gone, and so was the Scion and its monstrous embrace.


	3. III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Walking Simulator 2017

Nothing.

That was what Illapa found, at first: nothing.

No light, no sound, no matter. Only the void, with its distant, vaporous clouds surrounding only empty space. As if propelled by some force other than his own, Illapa found himself pulled in one particular direction, away from the approaching clouds that had been dimly backlit. Not with the violet light one would expect from the realm of the shadow, but with an eerie, sickly red. And from within those clouds and that red came whispers, distorted beyond even the black tongue with which the Scion’s kin might have spoken. Their language was maddened, mocking, relentless.

But so too was the relentless pull of that strange force, which carried him like a current in a stream, toward a pinpoint of light. It was a soft, blue light, but the contrast made it seem as though it might have been the brightest star at the heart of a galaxy.

_Thwip._

Solid ground?

One foot stepped onto solid ground, unbidden. The texture was softer than one might expect from compacted dirt, cobblestone, or concrete, and as Illapa looked down, he discovered soft, blue-green grass. This… was Val'sharah, the land where the beauty of the Dream had been bespoiled by the Nightmare’s corruption. This was the place between worlds, where the vigor of life still fought back against being twisted into misshapen beasts and unrecognizable piles of muck and slime.

Ahead, not too many steps down a path that glittered in places with what looked like garnets in with the gravel, was a bridge that could not have been possible. Over a stream of flowing emptiness that was of Elven architecture on both sides, but ten thousand years passed from one side of the bridge to the other. The simple Kaldorei woodwork gradually melded into a more elaborate contraption, the hand railings on the side gilded with vines of a familiar red and gold scheme. A single lantern illuminated the path beyond the bridge, beckoning with its eerily-inviting glow.

Illapa tread carefully now that he was moving of his own volition again. He was surprised to find the grass under his feet springy and healthy, and he placed his feet one after the other slowly and with care, almost reluctant to disturb the serenity of the grove by crushing those blades of blue-green grass.

Had the Nightmare not yet touched this part of the Dream? He thought back to the void of mist and light and strange radiations he had moved through just a moment before. He had not been pulled toward the churning cloud of crimson light and distorted voices, but to a single point of gentle blue-white light. He had seen that particular glow before, when Solarine’s holy magic burned white-hot and transcendent.

She was close. Had the Scion guided him here, or had Solarine herself somehow drawn him in? Was this her dream? Or her nightmare?

He crouched at the edge of the gravel path, sinking long fingers into the lush grass. It felt vibrant, living, real as a meadow on a summer’s day in Quel'thalas. He reached into the gravel and plucked one of the gleaming red gems from among the stones and held it up before his face.

The gleaming, garnet-like “gem” was something closer to a pomegranate seed, upon closer inspection. It held a squishy liquid encased in a thin membrane, but unlike a tasty pomegranate, this membrane did not contain anything edible. The “seed” inside turned, staring out at Illapa with a misshapen pupil as he inspected it.

The first signs of corruption, subtle and hidden in plain sight. The tiny gravel-sized eyeball reminded him uncannily of the Scion’s array of crimson eyes as he gently rolled it between his fingertips. The eye within the membrane swiveled to keep its gaze on his face, its misshapen pupil expanding and contracting minutely to adjust to the light.

With a deft flick of his thin wrist, he tossed the tiny eye into the empty stream and rose to his feet, stepping onto the gravel path. The stones crunched quietly under the soles of his tall boots, punctuated occasionally by a tiny wet sound as one of the scattered eyeballs fell victim to his steps.

He crossed the impossible bridge, a small part of him marveling at the way the architecture spanned the ten-thousand year history of the elves, transforming gradually from the subtle, organic architecture of their most distant kaldorei ancestors to the ornate stylings of the magic-blessed high elves. The stream bed below the arch of the bridge was empty, and his steps echoed hollowly as he crossed into the light of the lantern at the bridge’s other side.

The stream bed was not only empty, it was less than empty. Wisps of red-violet magics drifted into sight from time to time, out of the utter black void that seemed an endless chasm in what should have been a shallow stream. When the small red eye-seed fell into that stream of nothing, there was no  _plink_  of splashing water, but instead… the void whispered. Whatever it said was unintelligible, even to one fluent in the language of the void and the things that dwelt within.

Further down the path, there was a second lantern awaiting Illapa, its soft bluish light brightening the haze of humidity that hung as a pall over the green of the grass and towering forest.

As the impossible bridge gave way once more to the gravel path, the landscape changed. The green forest of Val'sharah evolved before all eyes present, ten thousand years of evolution happening in only a couple of footsteps. The tall oaks and larches and maples and firs twisted and changed, forming themselves first into familiar golden oaks and swirling cypress; and then, the gold began to wither and fade into sickly, dull green. The beautiful, blue-green grass kept its hue, but it began to wilt, and large, glowing mushrooms began to sprout alongside the path.

This was a familiar sight to any Sin'dorei, but instead of the spiderwebs that clung to the warped and twisted trees and plants in the waking world, there were strands of red slime. Hair-thin, almost like spiderwebs, but instead of spiders, there were tiny, digusting eyeballs with eight or nine spindly legs sticking out haphazardly. These eyeball-spiders appeared to be the only thing approximating animal life as the landscape of the Ghostlands made itself known, but from the mists arose something that told Illapa and the Scion that there was something there other than monsters.

Far off, in the distance, was the sound of wailing. A few voices rose above the oppressive silence, echoing through the trees. It was a sound any soldier would know, the sound of mourning after a losing battle.

It was a sound with which Illapa was terribly familiar. He was not a soldier of rank and file, but he was nonetheless a man of war, whether he was the brilliant beacon standing with the armed forces or the dark-robed shadow walking among the fallen at the battle’s end – giving healing to those who could be saved, swift mercy to those who could not, and the Sunwell’s final blessing to those who were already beyond.

It had been some time since he had last acted that role – a few years, at least – but at the first sound of echoing grief, he felt his stance shift unconsciously, already taking on the solemn mantle of his priesthood. He took the next lantern from its roadside post and carried it with him, a gentle blue light in the dark gloom of the Ghostlands.

The distant, echoing wails continued as Illapa walked along the lamp-lit path. Just when it seemed they might have subsided, another low moan would float through the air, carried upon the strange mist like the feather of a dying bird.

Soon, a signpost emerged from a fork in the path, its base enveloped in red slime mold. They wended their way up, with and through the wood, and the letters reading  _Tranquillien_ glowed from within with that same red light. A sane man might have avoided a path so blatantly pointing toward the heart of Solarine’s nightmare and that corruption that lay within, but then a sane man wouldn’t have stepped through with an eldritch monster in the first place.

Further down the path, another dim blue-white lamp lit the way, its glow somehow warm and inviting even in the creepy gloom of the Ghostlands.

He was sane enough to feel like a man following a will o’ wisp into the swamp, chasing that inviting glow straight into a bottomless peat bog that would suck on his bones for centuries until someone dug him up to distill a batch of scotch.

Still, at least he knew exactly how treacherous was the path he walked. The lantern he carried created a circle of gentle light that moved with him as he turned at the tainted sign to follow the lighted path. Even if they led him toward doom, he had no other path to walk – literally or figuratively.

Illapa was not the only being that might sense the strange “call” that came from the direction of Tranquillien, as soon as he stepped foot beyond the fork in the path. It lasted only moments, that strange and almost hypnotic whisper… like a song, but inside the mind. A siren’s call, if they were lucky.

The Nightmare’s horrid, bloody-red glow littered the sides of the path leading toward Tranquillien, twisted roots jutting up from puddles of muck, red strands of slime webbed between the rails of the fencing that sporadically appeared alongside the path.

Then, just as it seemed the corruption would overtake everything and consume whatever was left of Solarine’s dreamscape, the Nightmare ceased. The red haze vanished from the air, the sticky slime become nothing more than cobwebs, and the mushrooms were just mushrooms. A single, glowing feather laid in the center of the path, right at the line where the Nightmare had been stopped in its tracks. Beyond the feather was the ruined town of Tranquillien, miraculously free of any corruption beyond that of the undeath which had claimed the land a decade before.

 _The Nightmare deceives. The Nightmare devours._ The Scion’s warning resonated in his memory as he stood at the line where corruption gave way to familiarity. The glowing feather rested serenely at the toes of his boots, and once again he crouched to consider the strange tableau which presented itself.

The siren song whispered in his thoughts, just a few entreating strains, but it gave him pause. Something wanted him there. Something was luring him there. “Do you hear that?” he said quietly, as if to himself, but something else answered from nearby.

“Yes,” the Scion said, stepping out of seemingly nowhere, as it often did. Illapa gave it a faintly reproachful look, and it spread its hands diffidently. “We have been resisting the borders of the greater Nightmare that encroach on this part of the Dream. You asked for time, Our Eyes; We have given you what We can.”

Illapa spared it no gratitude. “Do you recognize it?” he asked. The monster tilted its head as though listening to a strain of music from an adjoining room.

“It is a unique voice,” it answered. Illapa nodded and plucked the glowing feather from where it rested at his feet. Another sign of Solarine’s magic: he had seen her mantled by feathered wings when she pulled a departing soul back from the brink of death.

So it was unique, that siren’s call, with its strangely tranquil and calming quality. The promise of peace and relief from the haggard, destroyed landscape and the corruption that boiled within.

Beyond the feather, past the apparent barrier which had halted the spread of the Nightmare, nothing but death greeted them. Corpses littered the path leading into the center of the town, but these were neither fresh nor those of living beings. These, half burnt into ash and charcoal, were corpses that had once been dead and rotting in the ground, and which had now been returned to doing just that. It was a massacre of undead, brutally efficient handiwork of which the Scion itself might be proud.

However, Solarine herself was nowhere to be found.

A new lamp flickered to life, calling them into the town that lay beyond.

Another familiar scene – it could have been taken from many of his more mundane nightmares. This more than anything assured him that Solarine would be close; these were nightmares he knew that she shared. It cast his surroundings in a new, intensely personal light compared to the crimson-infested landscape behind him. The ground he tread now was her own personal nightmare, as much memory as dream.

He stepped between the piles of Light-blasted bones and carbon remains, leaving footprints in a layer of ash. The song, part hymn and part lament, beckoned him on, and his heart was leaden in his chest as he began to suspect its source.

There was nothing else in this blighted dreamscape that could be so haunting and so beautiful.


	4. IV

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Scion is Too Good for Stairs

A single lamp flickered upon a single doorstep, the door itself beaten down and lying in jagged shards of shattered oakwood. The three-story house was an old-fashioned country-style dwelling, likely built centuries past, and its distinctly Elven architecture had its own southern Thalassian accents and mouldings that were less gratuitous and formal than the ostentatious gold and arcane stylings of Silvermoon City. It would have been inviting and cheery in daylight, surrounded by a well-tended garden, but now the flowers hung limp from dying stems and stalks, their petals falling away one by one. Two empty pits, half the size of a grown person, stood out against the garden’s grass and flowers, the soil dark and damp.

It was hard to tell which sets of gorestained footprints went into and out of the house with its broken door, but one set – the newest set, smaller than most and lined with charred soot – went in and only in. Whoever had been wearing those boots had not left wearing them.

The song quieted, the air around the old house becoming thick and stifling once again.

It was almost eerie just how familiar a scene it was. The battered door, the gardens wilted by ambient necromancy, the freshly-dug graves.

He stopped in the shadow of that once-inviting house, straddling the last line of soiled footprints. The Scion trailed behind, orienting its eyes in several directions around itself as it took in the scene with detached curiosity.

“I am here,” Illapa said into the quiet that followed the silence of the song. “Is this what I am meant to see? Am I where I am meant to be?” He half-turned in place, twisting his narrow shoulders to cast around for signs of anything not long-dead.

There was no answer, at least nothing in words anyone could understand.

The song then died entirely, and was replaced by the sound of weeping. A wretched, grief-torn sound, and in a very, very familiar voice. It came from somewhere in the upper levels of the house, where a large central living area was encircled by three sets of rooms, a sturdy half-wall preventing any unlucky or clumsy Elves from falling from the upper floors. The lower level appeared to be the basics – kitchen, dining room, sitting room, fireplace. All of the furniture, however, was in disarray. What was not overturned had been torn apart, drawers dumped on the floor. A cabinet full of a generational set of porcelain dishes had been smashed, shards of white and gold and flower-painted pottery littering the floor through nearly half the lower level of the dwelling.

This was all visible from the doorway, and the sickly-sweet stench of death and early stages of putrefaction was frankly obvious without the door there to hold it inside.

There was a momentary pause in the sobbing as Illapa and the Scion approached, growing briefly more distant, but it then continued as if nothing had happened.

A warm breeze, unusual in the cool mist hanging over the town like a funerary shroud, gently fluttered past Illapa and the Scion, caressing their backs as it seemed to try and push them physically into the ruined house.

Illapa caught himself stepping foward as that warm breeze gently caressed his back, and he stopped with one polished boot in front of the other. He had no way of knowing if the seemingly benign forces guiding him to the heart of Solarine’s personal nightmare were duplicitous or not; he knew only to be skeptical of everything he saw and encountered.

But what he had to remember was that this was a nightmare – and to counteract that, he had to be the opposing force. The Nightmare’s tools were grief and fear and paranoia that rendered the dreamers vulnerable and pushed them into its uniquely twisted madness. He had to subvert it, loosen its oppressive grip so that Solarine herself could see it clearly for the fabrication it was.

Here in Solarine’s nightmare, she – or the facsimilie of her – was lost and alone and grieving. So he put one boot in front of the other and entered the ravaged house, the mourner’s grief-stricken cries echoing through the once-homely halls.

Just as it had been in the forest along the path leading into Tranquillien, there were no signs of life. Overturned and ruined furniture littered the floors and hallways. Near a broken coffee table and shredded sofa was the remains of a beribboned wicker basket and bits of coloured paper – a gift basket, surely. A single chocolate wrapper sparkled on the floor at the base of the staircase leading up to the second and third levels of the cozy old house.

Mindless, insensate sobbing echoed through the central room, seemingly coming from an open door on the third floor.

There was something about it that might seem, to practiced ears, hollow. As though it came from a recording of sorts, played through the bell of a Goblin gramophone. And yet, even still, it was unmistakably Solarine’s voice.

His steps crunched on colorful tinfoil and the numerous white shards which were all that remained of a set of heirloom china. Despite the stench of death and early putrefication, there were no signs of life, or of death – no bodies sprawled, no splashes of blood or gore. Only the ruined trappings of a family’s stable, happy life and the inconsolable sobs from the upper floors.

Illapa had heard Solarine weep in joy and sorrow, and it was unmistakably her voice, her hiccuping sobs. He could even picture the way her nose and cheeks turned strawberry-red from the effort of crying.

But something about it was off. There was a mockingbird quality to the sound, too perfectly replicated.

His busy mind offered up a handful of possibilities. A predatory figment of the Nightmare, luring him in with Solarine’s sounds of grief. A memory of loss, trapped in a loop like a ghost. A manifestation of psychological trauma, roaming her dream-world.

Illapa glanced over his shoulder to where the Scion stood, gleaming ivory and red, serene as a saint. It uselessly returned the “look”, turning the eyeless planes of its half-face toward him in a mirror movement. It 'stared’ back for a long moment before turning its face upward, toward the sobbing emanating from the top floor of the house.

“The barrier erected at the border of this settlement does not allow sufficient extension of Our perception to be certain of the nature of this illusion.” It sounded almost… annoyed? As if determined not to be thwarted by the efforts of a simple mortal, the Scion’s handsome mouth set itself into a familiar hint of a stoic line. The top of its head nearly scraped the ceiling as it finally decided to approach the stairway leading upward… and stood there, blocking the way.

Carefully, it settled a single foot upon the first step. The illusory reality shimmered, and suddenly the monster disappeared.

And then, it peered down upon Illapa from over the half-wall separating the walkway of the third floor from the open center of the house, looming and strange. The sobbing continued, and now the Scion gave Illapa what could only be assumed as a “what do We do now” sort of look.

Illapa gave the Scion, two floors above, a look of faint reproach as he, too, placed a foot on the stairs and began to climb, stately and unhurried. “She is trying to keep the corruption at bay. She must be protecting this place. She knows it is vulnerable.” A hand strayed to his breast pocket, where he’d tucked the feather he’d plucked from the path, gleaming on a square of colored silk over his heart. What a feat it must have been to shelter even a small part of herself from the encroaching Nightmare while it ravaged her mind and body. She was not entirely lost, then. It was not too late. But it was not something she could conquer alone, as she must have realized when she bid him find the Scion.

“She is strong to preserve this small piece of the Dream,” the Scion agreed above him. He was uncertain whether it was inferring his thoughts or sensing them. He’d never spent time in its physical presence since they had given it autonomy, never observed its mannerisms, the way they mirrored his own through a distorted lens. The way it echoed his movements and responded to his actions with perfect synchronicity, perfect anticipation. There was a connection there, a deep and intrinsic one.

He stepped onto the second floor landing, continued up. “So this is not a dream. This is  _the_ Dream.”

“The metaphysical imprint of this world’s origination. Yes. Our Beloved’s impression on the impression. Yes.”

Something about the stairs changed, subtly and almost imperceptibly, as Illapa climbed the stairs rather than wasting his own energy and magic by teleporting to the third floor. His limbs and size were, of course, more suited to climbing them without hitting his head on the ceiling. It was a good height for a tall Elf to have plenty of room left over, but it seemed the home’s millennia-old builders had not thought to design it for an eight foot tall eldritch monster.

For shame.

The change as he ascended the stairs was not as marked as that crossing the bridge between Val'sharah and the dreamed version of the Ghostlands. Darkened, peeling wallpaper and paint subtly mended itself, regaining some illusion of life and occupancy. The dry, splintered wood of the stairs themselves became healthier, glossier. The centers of the steps were still worn from ages of boots stepping upon them, however, and a subtle scent of baked goods hung in the air as it brightened from dull, sickly green to the golden glow of early morning. It wasn’t clear where the sunlight was coming from, for the windows on the shared wall of the central chamber were still dark and curtained.

A single feather glowed near the end of the hallway balcony, in front of an open door. The magic contained within that feather was palpable even at a distance, perhaps even uncomfortable for a creature born of the Void.

The hallway, lit by golden morning sun and that single feather, was oddly silent. The sobbing had ceased.

In the third floor hallway Illapa turned in place, his stark silhouette and silvered hair edged in the gentle light of dawn, to find the Scion still on the stairway landing, unmoving. Though not prone to, and in many ways incapable of expression, he could still read the discomfort in its body language – in the way it held its four arms, the set of its incongruously handsome mouth. ( _His_ handsome mouth, in all fairness.)

“Are you coming?” he asked – not kindly, but not unkindly, either.

“It would be… difficult for Us to proceed,” the monster answered. Its lower pair of hands fidgeted together, dagger-like fingertips clacking quietly in succession.

“Wait there, then, but keep an ey– uh.” The Scion’s array of crimson eyes glimmered at the edge of the light. Illapa pinched the bridge of his nose. “Keep a… just… be vigilant.”

He turned quickly and could swear, just for a second, he heard a familiar giggle at the edge of hearing as he took the last few steps into the hallway and ducked into the open door. Assuredly just his imagination, stimulated by the ambiance of Solarine’s magic around him, as familiar and comfortable as the priestess’ physical presence.

Though Illapa had never been inside that bedroom before, it was still familiar, in a way. The warmth of light and magic, an antique four-poster bed that she still used on those occasions when she needed one of her own, familiar furniture from the little house in the hills, and a painting he had seen a few times before. A handsome, well-built man with a summer tan and golden hair, a small and somewhat plump woman with pale skin and raven-black hair, an angelic blonde toddler, and young girl of perhaps seven who looked very much like the doe-eyed woman, save for the dimples that mirrored those of the blonde man. The painting was idyllic as it hung in the middle of a ray of sunlight that poured in from nowhere.

Solarine, aside from the little girl in the painting, was nowhere to be found.

There was, however, an open door into the next room. It was more of a suite than an individual room, and the furnishings in the next room were much like those in this one. Something felt  _off_ about that room, however. The edges of the doorway shimmered with just a little bit of warped magic, and if Illapa looked at it through the corner of his eye, the illusion began to unravel.

The frame’s paint, through the corner of an eye, at the very edge of the gaze, began to peel, the room began to darken, and the scent of copper wafted through the air along with the dust particles that swirled about in the golden light.

Illapa paused for a moment in this golden oasis of memory. He recognized some of the furniture in the room, things the present-day Solarine had scavenged from her family’s home and still used. And the painting, of course, one of her most cherished possessions, if not  _the_ most cherished. It looked glossy and new in this vision of the home of her youth, lacking the scuffs and signs of age that had crept in over the years, despite the painstaking care she gave it.

There was another doorway leading into another room. Not an individual room but a bedroom suite, something that a pair of elven sisters close in age might share in their familial home. But looking at it, he felt none of the security he did standing in this golden-lit room, though it stood there innocuous and seemingly normal. The unease crept in around the edges, betraying the ominous details in brief and subtle flashes when he turned his attention away from it.

 _This is a nightmare_ , he reminded himself silently as he stepped cautiously through the doorway. _Be the dream._

The scene Illapa stepped into, through that doorway, was truly something out of the most terrible of nightmares. The sobbing they had followed through the entire house had begun again, but nobody was there in that room. Everything from the floor to the ceiling had been scorched, charred almost beyond recognition in some places.

Blackened bits of feathers from a down-filled pillow littered a torn-apart mattress so covered in bloodstains that it could hardly be recognised as what it was. The blood was somehow still almost-liquid, despite the ozonic char of what could only have been holy fire that had burnt the room’s contents to peeling cinders. The wallpaper curled away from the walls in blackened scales, and a mirror atop a ruined dresser had been melted into a glob of ugly, brownish glass and drips of silver.

On the floor, though, was where the nightmare truly had taken hold, even in Solarine’s protected little corner of the dream.

Half-eaten, mangled bodies lay in a pile of gore, glistening and wet. Flies circled and buzzed overhead, but no maggots yet crawled in what were the remains of two small children. Somehow, they had remained untouched by the holy fire, and instead of flame or maggots, a frothy bunch of what looked like violet and crimson bubbles had begun to creep forth from the cavities where their ribs had once protected vital organs.

Except, of course, upon closer study, the froth was not made up of bubbles. It was thousands upon thousands of tiny, staring, lidless eyes.

And then – something began to happen, to both Illapa and to the Scion as the former observed the horrifying scene and as the latter kept watch outside, at the top of the staircase. A sensation that would now be terribly familiar to both of them, the very fabric of space and time began to warp around them, pressing in on their chests and forcing all the air out of their lungs as they were forcibly yanked out of the house, away from the creeping Nightmare that had begun to infest Solarine’s dream-within-a-dream and erode away at what little part of herself she had managed to preserve.

As soon as it began, it was over.

With a  _POP_ , both Illapa and the Scion were deposited atop a blank, glossy, black plane that hung suspended nowhere. Everywhere. The stars shone all about them, glinting off the obsidian-like platform at their feet.


	5. V

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Babe Did You Fall From Heaven Because You Seem To Be an Ever-Shifting Sphere of Wings and Light Making a Sound Not of This Earth and I'm Kind Of Hoping God Sent You Because This is Terrifying

The scene on the other side of that doorway was… well, nightmarish, of course. The blackened ruin of unleashed holy fire was incongruous with the fresh, sticky corpses sprawled on the bedroom floor. Only in nightmares could the two coexist. A detached part of his mind recognized the distinctive mangling caused by ravaging ghouls, soft meat and offal mindlessly clawed and gouged from still-living bodies. Nothing he did not already expect.

But the thousandfold multitude of tiny eyes spilling from their wounds like a fungal bloom had no place in either memory or reality. The Nightmare had its teeth in this place, but before he could puzzle out what to do about it, before he could call for the Scion, the woman’s mindless sobbing crested and distorted. A great weight seemed to settle on his chest with the intent of flattening him and turning him inside-out, and the bedroom-turned-abattoir receded into darkness.

Or perhaps he was being pulled away. He saw the gaunt ivory body of his counterpart suspended in the void beside him, though he could neither call out nor reach for it; but with apparent ease, two of the Scion’s long arms crossed the infinite space between them and embraced him, anchoring him.

And then abruptly, after a moment and an eternity, he found a surface under his feet and air in his lungs. The glossy black plane under his boots reminded him of the monolithic library-vault hidden away in his own mental landscape; it stretched away flat and featureless in every direction. By contrast, the sky above was a sea of stars like diamond dust scattered on rich velvet.

“This is unprecedented,” the Scion said calmly; he realized that its hands were still on him, and he broke the hold with a desultory twist of his shoulders.

“What happened?” Illapa demanded. “This does not look like the Nightmare. Or the Dream. This looks like…”

Before Illapa could finish his thought, something happened.

The light of one of those distant stars seemed to drift closer. Closer, and closer it came, like a snowflake blown on the breeze, but there was no breeze in this strange place, suspended in time and space.

As it neared the edge of the platform, that starlike pinpoint began to grow brighter and brighter, until - in a blinding flash of light, it collapsed into a single pinpoint of darkness. The light of the stars behind it, and even the smooth plane of the platform itself, warped, distorting and lensing around the object until the light itself ceased to exist.

With another blinding flash of light, she appeared.

Far too many wings, luminous and white, sprung from her back, unfurling to a length far beyond that which would have been needed simply to propel her small form into flight. She didn’t seem to need them for flight at all, though, because she hovered there, just off the edge of the obsidian platform, all six of her wings extended to frame herself and to bathe the platform and those upon it in the eerie luminosity radiating from her.

Her body, at a glance, was nearly unaltered – it had not distorted as Illapa’s had when he had undergone his ascension, transforming into the being which now stood beside him. Her flesh was as white, perfect, and bloodless as if she had been carved from a block of the purest marble. Clad in only wispy lengths of sheer, sparkling golden fabric which somehow floated on their own, her nakedness did not seem as though it had been overlooked. Rather, her gift of flesh was on display to all who beheld her terrible beauty.

Fathomless, starlit violet eyes peered out from an impassive, gently-smiling face wreathed in hair so black that it seemed as though it might have been tendrils of the Void itself springing from her scalp. Perhaps it was, because it too floated about her as if she was suspended in an ocean of water instead of stars and nothingness.

Looking at her directly only seemed to deepen the galaxy behind her eyes, and those who did so might just be drawn in, unable to escape the event horizon of the distortion which had birthed her into the mortal plane.

Glowing feathers fell from luminous wings, and she fluttered those wings, wafting feathers toward them. They smelled of ozone and crackled with holy fire, and each one that touched bare flesh – man or monster, it did not matter – seared like a hot poker before sinking in and leaving a curious sensation of warmth. Pleasant… too pleasant. Like the hot, sleepy sort of summer day that lulls drivers into dozing off behind the wheel.

When she spoke, it was not with those colourless lips. Whispers, many many whispers, echoed through the vastness of the stars, as if it were the stars themselves that whispered their secrets to the Priest and the Scion at once.

She extended a hand to them, palm up. Six fingers beckoned in turn.

 _I have escaped the cycle, and have brought you here, away from the clutches of the Nightmare. It cannot touch you in this place,_  she whispered to them individually and all at once. A hint of a familiar smile touched her lips and the corners of her eyes as she gazed upon Illapa and the Scion.  _Come. Let us transcend mortality. Let us renew the world and cleanse it of this corruption. Become one with me. Become… Us…_

Illapa watched with mingled hope and dread as that light-bending star drifted down from the celestial expanse; those mixed emotions only blossomed as the point of light inverted and birthed the new vision of Solarine, terrible and beautiful.

She looked angelic, framed by her six feathered wings, glowing with sterile blue-white light; her skin bloodless and perfect, seeming at once as hard as marble and as soft as a newborn, the work of a virtuoso sculptor.

The eyes betrayed her most of all; not the brilliant cornflower-blue of her spiritual self, but violet and fathomless, a tiny universe behind them.

Wrong. All wrong despite her beatific appearance. He felt his heart simultaneously rise in his throat and plummet in his chest, but his mind was already removing itself, growing distant from his more visceral reactions, shifting into the cold, clear, analytical state that had served him so well for so many years. The one that had attached all manner of fearful murmurings to his name  _long_ before he had taken up the mantle of the Void’s power: Merciless. Tyrant. Monster.

Meanwhile, the monster beside him smiled. Languid, esctatic, its blind head elegantly tilted on its neck, it smiled. “Our Beloved,” it said, and Illapa had a moment to appreciate the gods-awful situation he had created by bringing it here before it took a step toward the priestess.

Its approach was met by a waft of feathers, white-hot and crackling with holy fire. It took barely a thought for Illapa to conjure a thin barrier against which they burned and hissed, but the Scion merely stepped into the gale, burning feathers meeting its ivory skin. They vaporized and disappeared, but also stopped the monster in its tracks, though it seemed not to betray any discomfort.

“Solarine.” He had to act quickly before he succumbed to the eerie call of this place – or before the Scion betrayed him, as he had always feared it would. “Solarine,” he repeated, drawing the attention of those coruscating eyes. “Have we not stood here before? Have we not already lived this? Did you not once stand before me, trying vainly to shake me from my own twisted ideals? Look through this illusion and see this for what it is: history repeating.”

 _I am not Them_ , Solarine whispered in return, that same beatific, madonna-like smile upon her bloodless lips.  _The Faceless have no control over me, and I care not for Their plans and desires. This…_ She tilted her head, sending a ripple through the floating cloud of void-hair.  _This ascended state is something toward which I worked on my own volition. It was to be used only if our guest betrayed us_ , she glanced benignly at the Scion, _but now I have found it so much more useful. The Nightmare cannot touch me here. I have escaped its grasp, and now I offer you the same salvation._

She landed on the platform, her bare toes touching and reflecting off the iridescent, reflective obsidian, and took a step toward Illapa and the Scion.

Six fingers extended calmly toward them, and with a flick of those on her other hand, every burning-hot feather drifting from her six wings rose and encircled the platform in a facsimile of the glowing barrier of Light with which she had so recently protected herself and Illapa from falling missiles outside the Temple of the Moon.

_My only desire is to save us all. I care not for conquest, nor do I answer to any but myself. There is no illusion._

A flicker.

As she “spoke” those last few words, the graceful angelic form flickered as if it were a projection from a Draenic hologram crystal. For just the briefest of moments, doubt also flickered across her face, so familiar with its calm smile and dimples, so strange with the empty, vast eyes.

So this was the product of her own ritual of ascension. It was true that she had been working toward it in the event that the Scion proved hostile or uncontrollable, and he had all but begged her not to continue the research. What stood before him was every bit as glorious and terrible as he had feared.

The thing about ascension was that it took you further and further away from what – and who – you used to be.

“ _Them_ or no, if you cannot see the parallels here, then you have been blinded by your own light,” Illapa challenged as her bare feet alighted on the plane on which he stood. He half-turned, presenting her with the narrow edge of an admittedly already narrow body, one hand tucked at the small of his back, the other held forth to gesture as he spoke. It was a pose reminiscent of a courtier or a fencer, stiff-backed and poised.

“You have escaped nothing. You have been seduced and ensnared, given the illusion of power so that you will not oppose the corruption which floods your veins and poisons your mind.” He cast a wary gaze about himself as the drifting feathers were spurred into flight, forming a luminescent barrier around them, but he did not miss the literal flicker of doubt that briefly distorted her form. “Compelling you to seduce or subdue the beings who would save you from it. Or can you keep telling yourself that this is somehow for my own good?” he pressed.

 _The world out there is doomed,_  Solarine told Illapa and the Scion, with such certainty that they might have believed her, if not for the fact that they were all trapped within her nightmarish fever-dream and she herself seemed just as trapped within her own illusion.

 _The gods of the void call from one side, the Nightmare from the other. And from above, death rains down upon us from beings not of this world or any other, for their own have all been destroyed. Just as ours will be._  The passive, gently-smiling face’s lips lost their benevolence, turning down slightly as the gravity of the situation weighed upon her.

She looked between Illapa and the Scion, taking both of them in as if she might forget who they were or what they looked like if she did not.

_I could not save them. The little ones, even here they perished because I was too weak to intervene. No longer. Not ever again will the blood of my kin – chosen and born – run from opened veins. I have become that which can oppose death itself._

She looked up, into the starlit sky, through the shield of feathers that encapsulated the platform, and she pointed overhead, toward a reddened, dimming, flickering pinpoint of starlight. _It comes for you, even here._

Illapa’s rigid demeanor softened just a bit under Solarine’s tender gaze. “It was not weakness, my love. The nature of nightmares is that we are doomed to relive them, over and over again. We cannot alter that which haunts us; it is an unchanging burden. You are not to blame for what happened here.”

He glanced up, through the haze of feathers and toward that flickering, lurid star. “This place, this  _nightmare_ is playing to your fears and insecurities. It has assaulted your psyche with old hurts and guilt, and now it is twisting your desires to preserve and protect. You think you have become something that can oppose death, but Solarine, out there in our world it is  _you_ who is dying, and nothing you do here will save yourself or anyone else. You cannot see these things clearly now, but _I_  can. Trust me to see the truth for you. Let me be your eyes.”

Solarine tilted her head slightly as she peered up at Illapa. Then, she turned her fathomless gaze to the Scion.

 _You have been the eyes for many,_  she told them both, her voice still kind, but with a faint edge of amusement.  _And yet you could not see your own truth. How could you see mine?_  She raised her eyes once again to the flickering pinpoint of red, diseased light. There were now two or three nestled comfortably in the beginnings of a nebula.

“Because an outside observer often has a position of perspective,” Illapa countered, his voice dry in the face of her amusement at his expense. “That is rather the point.”

A second flicker, as Illapa spoke and as she gazed up into the corruption that had begun to spread even into the “safe” place beneath the stars, the strange dimension she had created to shield the deepest parts of her mind from the Nightmare.

A brief glimpse of something – a shard of pure blue, beneath the vastness of the stars behind the ascended Solarine’s eyes.

 _If it is no longer safe here, then I will take us to a new place,_  she told them, whispers floating like feathers on the currents that wafted them aloft about the obsidian platform.  _A new place, free from this infection. Perhaps…_

She turned to the Scion, her gaze boring into that of the central eyes upon its chest.  _You know this realm better than any mortal, do You not?_

If this was the safe place Solarine had created for herself, then any alternatives sounded… bad.

“It is so,” the Scion replied, breaking its period of observant silence.

Solarine continued to gaze thoughtfully at the Scion, the only things moving about her were her hair and the feathers that continually detached from her many wings and drifted off to join the others encaging the platform.

 _If… there was a place, away from the Faceless and hidden from the Nightmare,_ she mused, then smiled. _If such a place existed, for just the three of us… no, four. Varali must be brought here as well. Would You guide us?_  she asked the Scion, now extending that delicate, six-fingered hand toward it rather than Illapa.

Illapa turned on his counterpart as the Scion considered that proffered hand.

“A realm of our own making,” the creature mused, and Illapa felt whatever progress he’d made slipping away.

“No,” he said to them both with a familiar, inflexible note of command, as if just by speaking he could make it so. “Solarine, you cannot do that. Your body is dying and your spirit is succumbing. The only thing that lies beyond this place is the Nightmare, and if you try to leave here it will take you. There is  _nowhere to go._ ”

Solarine’s eyes narrowed slightly as she returned her gaze to Illapa, his stern tone apparently not sitting well with her in her newfound power and form. She lowered that hand back to her side, the length of flowing golden cloth drifting lazily back into place so it once again floated several inches above the flesh it wreathed.

 _You are trying to make me vulnerable to the Nightmare, aren’t you?_  she asked, her tone no longer at all amused. Now, it held a slightly accusatory note. _You have become jealous of me, of this accomplishment, because you are afraid I will… what? Misuse the gift I have been given?_

Illapa’s chin lifted, a hint of a sneer twisting the firm lines of his mouth. His black, tailed coat flapped around him as he made a sweeping gesture with one hand, stern voice laced with disbelief. “Vulnerable? I am trying to  _save_ you. I have crossed realms and allied with monsters just to pull you out of its jaws. And to that you say that I am  _jealous_?”

Something rippled across or beneath the glossy obsidian surface. Not a reflection, not light. The absence of it. Twisting, sinuous shapes. A low thrum beneath their feet, like a single knock at a distant door.

 _“Have you forgotten who I am?”_  he snarled, a dangerous glint in his glowing eyes.

A flicker, again. Solarine’s changed form rippled as a look of doubt crossed her face, as if Illapa’s words had started to break through the haze of her fevered nightmares.

Then, her form solidified, and a glint of a terribly familiar diseased crimson reflected itself in the galaxies behind her eyes. Just like the corruption spreading through the starlit sky overhead – perhaps it was part of that same sky.

 _You aren’t real,_  she hissed in her echoing, whispery psychic voice.  _Neither of you are real! You’ve been sent to try and lure me away from safety, back to the Nightmare from whence I assumed this form to escape!_  The dome of searing feathers crackled ominously as her words went from disbelief to realization and then to outright anger.

Another bone-deep tremor ran through the obsidian platform.

“You have escaped nothing. You have fled into a trap of your own making, and I will not let you remain here at the mercy of your own delusions.”

_Thud._

“I will not allow it.”

_Thud._

“I will  _not_ let you destroy yourself.”

_THUD._

Something rose from the infinite space beneath the floating platform, briefly obscuring a swath of starry sky: a massive, boneless appendage that stretched heavily into the sky above their heads before crashing down on one edge of the platform. The surface beneath his and the Scion’s feet listed with the weight of it, threatening to tip them into the starry expanse until a second rose and slammed down on the other side.

A third. A fourth. The massive edge of one violet-black appendage came down on the edge of the glowing dome, shearing a clean line into the barrier of feathers. The violet-black flesh seared where they touched, leaving great smoldering burns of exposed flesh that glowed a bright and vivid purple ridged by curling, blackened skin. Mangled feathers exploded from the breach like down like from a burst feather pillow.

The scarred appendage curled on itself, then sagged heavily and slid away, disappearing off the edge of the platform like a wounded serpent. Under the dome, there was only a brief ripple of twisting reality that was the hallmark of the Scion’s entrances or exits.

Illapa himself was nowhere to be seen – that is, until another shadowy appendage unfurled from the void beneath the platform, the priest perched deftly on its violet-black hide. Instead of stark clothes, it now seemed he was garbed in lightless night, indistinguishable from the dark between the stars around them. Only his pale face and silver hair stood out against the black, and the glow of his eyes had shifted to Void-stained purple.


	6. VI

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's Always F*cking Tentacles

When the first of those monstrous, shadowy tentacles slammed down upon the platform, something about the way the angel winced was very reminiscent of the normal, uncorrupted Solarine. Her guard had momentarily faltered, and a very mortal-like whimper escaped her marble-white lips as she was startled into flickering once again.

Quickly, though, she righted herself and regained her full height, and the expression on her face became utterly statue-like. Impassive, calm, and detached, save for the crimson that had begun to swirl about in what had been her eyes.

 _It is you who are the delusion_ , she stated in an almost robotic, somewhat uninterested tone reminiscent of that once heard by Brann Bronzebeard when Algalon threatened to re-originate the entirety of Azeroth.

_I will cleanse this realm of your corruption and free our world of the Nightmare’s grasp._

Blue-white, searing Holy fire crackled to life around her as all six of her wings lit themselves aflame with it, burning so brightly that it might have become difficult for Illapa to even focus on her for very long without leaving sunspots in his vision. A swirl of burning feathers swept up from around her feet, which left the platform as she suspended herself in the air, away from the vibrations that the massive Void tentacles had sent through the obsidian.

Without speaking another word, Solarine raised both of her hands in what might have been a benevolent gesture, and a barrage of razor-sharp, white-hot feathers was sent shooting through the air, toward Illapa and the tentacle that held him aloft.

The white-hot feathers blazed light trails in his vision as they streaked toward his position atop the massive tentacle. With an alacrity that belied his age, Illapa crouched and launched himself into the starry void as the barrage of razor pinions struck the shadowy flesh where he’d stood just a moment before. A hundred strikes turned the vast, muscular appendage into a ribboned ruin, violet-black skin curling away in blackened swaths from the flesh beneath. The raw flesh glowed a bright, searing purple as it continued to burn from within, and the tentacle fell slowly, ponderously, crashing into the obsidian platform before sliding limply back into the abyss.

Illapa did not have far to fall. A new tentacle rose and plucked him deftly from the air, and he rounded on the luminescent form of Solarine ascendant. There was little left of his lady in the mask-like visage, in the empty eyes, in the cold proclamation that she would scour his corruption from creation.

Not that she was entirely wrong in her Nightmare-deluded judgment. He was part of the corruption. As the Scion had once said, he was the key and the gate, the keeper and the way – and he had thrown the gates open wide. He would need every ounce of power the Void could suffuse him with to counter Solarine in this state.

The tentacle beneath his feet coiled and tossed him into the grasp of another before it, too, fell to another barrage of blinding feathers. Fully a dozen now writhed up from the abyss like some stellar kraken – including the one that unfurled behind Solarine, looping to twist around the radiant, winged priestess as she was distracted by her elusive lover.

Solarine, unlike the Scion, possessed only one set of eyes in her ascended form. A vague sense of satisfaction might have been communicated in the expression upon the mostly-blank, mask-like face of her angelic form as hundreds of feathers ripped Illapa’s tentacle to shreds. Slowly, she lowered her hand as she surveyed her handiwork, but as she did this, one of her pairs of wings curled about her torso in a protective manner. One half-curled about her legs, and the last remained extended above and behind her head, like a shining beacon meant almost to taunt her opponents into coming for her.

 _Already, one of your creations has fallen,_ she told them calmly, matter-of-factly.  _I will not fall to this corruption so easily._

As the tentacles writhed about the edges of the platform, Solarine not only ceased trying to track all of them visually, but she closed her eyes and instead held both hands up in a gesture familiar to any Priest who might call upon the Holy Light.

Twin flames grew in the palms of her hands, flickering blue-white as they burned with such intensity that they even revealed the strands of hair within the flowing, void-like mane that wreathed her head where the wings did not. Then, she hurled both to the platform at her feet, and fern-like patterns of brilliant magic burned through the surface and radiated outward, forming a protective circle about her that would, at the very least, painfully sear anything – man, monster, or tentacle – that dared approach her closely enough to touch it.

From atop his most recent, sinuous perch, Illapa watched that mandala of light illuminate the platform in a radius below Solarine’s hovering form. Consecrated ground. The glossy black surface had just become a child’s game of the-floor-is-lava.

Fortunately his shadowy summons had no need to touch the platform. The burst of holy power scalded patches of violet-black hide from the massive appendage that twisted around Solarine, but did not flense it like the assault of feathers had done to the first. As she discharged the energy into the platform below her, the tentacle’s lazily looping coils constricted, first squeezing the delicate shell of her six wings. Despite their fragile appearance, the wings did not buckle and snap like frail bird bones, resisting even the strength of the redwood-thick girth that wrapped around her. The white-hot feathers hissed and burned where the tentacle’s thick hide touched, but the muscular appendage continued to squeeze mindlessly, mercilessly, and even she would be hard-pressed to resist being crushed without effort.

Illapa did not answer her impassive taunts. Let her be smug. He was counting on it.

While she was forced to divert her attention to annihilating his manifestations – not just the one that wrapped around her, but the half-dozen others that threatened to join it and pile on her like a nest of frenzied serpents – he took the opportunity to bring his true assault to bear.

He could no longer make out the glove on the hand he held out before himself; nor cuff nor sleeve nor glittering cufflink. Everything was black, a man-shaped silhouette cut in the cloth of this quasi-reality.

An eye opened on the night-dark palm, the same shade as the Void-stained glow that now emanated from his natural eyes. His vision doubled, tripled, more as they continued to open like night-blooming flowers on his transfigured skin.

and he heard a most

beautiful

_s o n g_

he could see the weave

it was so easy to reach out

and pluck

a thread

And where he reached out and touched, space and light distorted like a ripple in a pond. A tiny sphere eversed from a single point in reality, an utter absence of light, darker than even his eye-studded form. It drank the ambient glow from Solarine’s consecrated ground, and the space around it rippled again as its horizon expanded. It distorted the view of the stars beyond it, all those points of light seeming to bend and dip sharply toward its surface at impossible angles. A swirling corona of deep violet radiation began to form around it as it grew, filling their ears with the radio static hiss of vaporizing matter.

A sphere of Void the size of a marble. A sunfruit. A scrying orb. Its growth slowed but never quite stopped, and it hung in the space above the platform, before Solarine’s ascendant form.

He would devour the light and its maddening hold on her.

The original, real Solarine surely would have stopped her offense and either come to her senses or at least tried to defend herself as tentacles summoned directly from her own void realm wrapped about her, trying to crush her wings and shatter the nightmare illusion she had created. The real Solarine would have at least paused in awe when Illapa’s void form overtook him, darkening his silhouette like the void and opening so, so many eyes. It was no wonder he and the Scion had been chosen for one another in the Faceless’ quest to see and learn all They could.

But this was not Solarine as he knew her, and she appeared barely affected by any of it. Her expression remained impassive, her eyes closed as if she was simply in meditation rather than a battle for both their lives, and a remnant of her placid Priestess’ smile remained fixed in place as if carved there. The topmost pair of wings finally curled around her head, protecting it from the assault by the tentacles wrapping about her, and a sound akin to hot metal screaming against dry ice shrieked out into the darkness of the stars before it began to be drowned out by something far more terrible.

She, too, had a song.

And she, too, could touch the Void.  
  
It was an ancient hymn that her psychic voice began to sing, one that vibrated and rippled not only through the air, but through the very fiber of the strange universe in which they had been suspended, atop a platform made of resolute will and protected memory. The air itself filled with a haze of golden light, and no matter how much Illapa absorbed and devoured, he would never be able to extinguish it.

The true power of this hymn was not in its light, but in the psychic vibration that began to ripple underneath, through, and into all present. Like the deep bass of a huge pipe organ, Illapa’s very bones (or whatever passed for bones in a shadow form) began to vibrate as Solarine searched for the resonant frequency that would shatter them into splinters and bone dust.

the air filled with golden light

he swam it, he breathed it

he had been here before

not the thing he was now

but the man

younger (much)

pale hair, but instead of silver, a blush of gold

and eyes unlined by wisdom or hardship

(though the shadow of arrogance, even then)

they had taken him there

to stand before a sea of light

a font

a well

and taken a single drop of its radiance

and anointed his brow

he had found himself in the heart of the sun

he had seen a realm of endless light

where things of skin and dreams did not walk

and never had

and never would

and he had opened his mouth and out poured the light

and he had opened his eyes and out poured the light

and his tears of ecstasy burned on his cheeks

and his sobs were the sincerest hymn he had or would ever sing

perhaps that was where he had first known this hunger

to be more, to be more, to be MORE

to shed his skin and dreams and walk in realms of

endless light

endless shadow

at the heart of everything

A persistent tremor shook the obsidian platform as the Void sphere continued to draw light and matter to its obliterating surface. The platform’s reflective sheen began to dull as the sphere stripped atoms away from its glossy surface. It sucked in even the light that filled the air, the golden haze blueshifting as it was drawn to the horizon, adding to the violet swirl that spun around it in a hurricane spiral.

A hissing shriek filled the air as the constricting tentacle tightened around Solarine’s serene form, heat and pressure producing an agonizing screech as the muscular column strained to crush her winged coccoon. Great swaths of violet-black flesh burned away under its own crushing weight, but it persisted with painless, mindless, idiot intent. A half-dozen unscarred tentacles joined it just as it seemed it would collapse under the damage, and Solarine’s floating form disappeared under a writhing mass intent to crack her nightmarish vessel.

It did nothing to stop her song. The psychic hymn resonated not just matter, not just mind, but the very fiber and structure of that strange quasi-realm and everything within it.

It was beautiful, a melodic counterpoint to the basso profondo of the Void and the chorus of entities that dwelled within it. A song not just of light, not just of shadow, but of the annihilating force where they met. He could hear her song exploring the scales, seeking the perfect destructive note that would undo him. His void-infused flesh began to thrum in response, those terrible chords seizing the most vulnerable parts of him and threatening to ravage him from within: bones, vessels, organs, and all.  
  
The tentacles’ writhing became erratic as miles of muscles began to spasm, their hold weakening as their strength betrayed them. Violet-black hides ruptured and split spontaneously as connective tissue weakened. They began to fall away, one by one, limp and ponderous, disappearing back into the black void below. Rays of light shone out where their coils fell away from Solarine, bathing the Void sphere with spears of white light and heat.

It pulled them in them greedily, swelling threateningly, a storm of perfect darkness at the center of a sea of light. But Solarine’s hymn shook the very fabric of that strange dimension, and even in his own ascended state, Illapa felt something like dread as the sphere began to destabilize. The perfect curvature of its horizon began to bulge equatorially; the storm of violet radiation around it spun out into a thin disc. A ripple ran through the spiral arms of crackling energy around it – and then, with a sickening  _pop_ , the sphere of utterdark at its center collapsed, annihilating itself.

The massive tentacle holding him aloft spasmed as the destructive resonance began to savage it, too. The psychic pressure nearly obliterated all thought as he simply struggled to hold himself together, to hold onto the power that suffused his flesh and mind. The violet-black hide under his feet split and peeled. Shadowstuff vaporized from his skin, wisping away into the eternal night. A glowing violet eye ruptured and popped. His sight went out, one glowing eye after another.

He fell. It was a long way to fall. When he crashed into the cracked obsidian, the burst of white-hot light behind his eyes was nearly as bright as Solarine’s terrible radiance. He heard the sound of impact on the unyielding stone, the heavy thud of soft meat and the deep crack of his bones. He struggled to breathe, mouth gaping and chest heaving, and when he finally managed to suck in a breath, the pain of shattered ribs almost made him regret it.

The power drained out of him, a broken vessel that could no longer contain it. Blood-rimmed eyes – only two of them, now – stared up into the starry sky. The few crimson stars that had first appeared were now a vast nebula that stained the celestial expanse. Solarine hovered on blinding wings against a backdrop like a bloodstain on a sky adorned with a thousand bloated, dying suns.


	7. VII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Falling Damage / Illapa's Worst Case of Tinnitus

Two equally ancient, equally powerful, and equally terrible magics converged there, in that strange sphere of the universe, cordoned off from both the Nightmare and the mortal plane that had both played a part in birthing it and the being now residing at its center.

Feathers, magic, and bits of void ichor and shadow flesh vibrated atop what had been the glossy surface of the obsidian platform, and as Solarine adjusted the frequencies and resonances of her terrible hymn, all of the pieces of debris littering the surface began to migrate along it, forming intricate patterns with each new tone at the core of each new scale.

The golden light now pouring out from beneath the cords of ruined flesh and rubbery muscle only strengthened in intensity, driving back the shadow and pushing into the void as if to illuminate the very heart of darkness Illapa had conjured.

Solarine had lost – no, abandoned – the balance she held as the core of her philosophy, the very center of the web that bound the many threads of her spiritual, metaphysical, and ordinary beliefs and behaviors. Without restraint, she had become a being of pure, unfeeling light and wrath, raining down destruction upon friend and foe alike.

Illapa hit the surface of the platform with a sickening crunch, barely noticeable above the deafening din threatening to shake the entire miniature realm apart, and just as the vibration became so painful, so close to simply causing him to explode in a shower of gore –

_flicker_

Something, somehow, distracted the Priestess inside the illusory ascendant.

_flicker_

A second time.

Her concentration wavered, and the hymn faltered, going off-key and sending discordant but not quite as destructive waves and pulses of sound, each pitch fighting for dominance over the other, into the debris now rattling and sliding about atop the platform like so much gravel on the surface of a child’s off-kilter merry-go-round.

It was among the most uniquely torturous things he’d ever experienced. The psychic resonance vibrated the surface on which he lay, obsidian dust and beads of black ichor vibrating in cymatic patterns around his less-mobile body. Gobbets of void-suffused flesh and limp, mangled tentacles slid toward the edges of the platform and fell silently into the abyss, until all that remained were the shifting patterns of fine debris with his battered body at the center.

The stone buzzed beneath him. The air vibrated in his lungs, the blood in his veins, the fluids in his organs. His bones buzzed in time, a fresh spike of agony burning through him each time Solarine shifted the frequency of her hymn, inching closer to the destructive resonance that would turn his already broken bones into a mass of splinters. Vessels popped in his eyes, flooding the violet sclera with blood. He tasted it at the back of his throat and seeping from his gums.

And through it all he was powerless to stop her, to even struggle, rendered broken and paralyzed from both the fall and her intent to render his battered body into formless gore. He was as helpless as a bug pinned to a card.

He wasn’t aware of what happened to interrupt Solarine’s song, but the moment it faltered was a moment of bitter relief. The hymn lost its merciless frequency, turning into discordant pulses. Bits of stone and black blood clattered into stillness around him, and the agony of her hymn was swiftly replaced by the clamoring chorus of his injuries, almost mercifully mundane by comparison.

He sucked in the air he’d struggled to breathe while in the grip of Solarine’s song, gasping and gagging from the pain of shattered ribs warring with the desperate need to breathe. He tried to move, to stand, to  _drag himself_  if need be. The heel of a boot scraped a furrow in a gout of black blood, and that was all.

And she hovered above him, a masterpiece of radiant flesh and terrible mercy, her pitiless eyes swirling with crimson disease.

“Solarine,” he rasped. Get her talking. Think of something. Do something. Don’t die here. Don’t die.  _Don’t let them both die here._  
  
It worked, at least momentarily. The ascended Priestess’ terrible hymn faded, not completely, but to what was an eerily-soothing melody that warmed, calmed, and made its listener oh-so-very sleepy if they dared pay closer attention to its strains, sung in a language more ancient than time itself.

 _Do you see?_  she asked, her voice still calm and nearly emotionless, a momentary flicker of something like emotion crossing the too-still facial features.

 _Do you see how pointless it truly is, to oppose the Light’s cleansing fire? The deeper denizens of your nightmare realm will see and hear what has transpired here, and they too will see that their cause is doomed. For I shall stand in the path of all that dare threaten…_  She paused, a hint of a shadowed furrow appearing on her brow.  _All that dare threaten my family?_  she finished, sounding confused.

The crimson taint flared brilliantly in her eyes now, almost all of their starlight snuffed out by the corruption.

She raised a hand to the sky, where wisps of starfire gathered in the palm of her hand, glowing with a peaceful, blue-white light that would surely bring instant, searing annihilation on anything or anyone against whom it was used. The soothing lullaby-hymn continued to whisper around them all, as if to ease and provide some strange comfort in the moments before their inevitable passing.

Illapa struggled to keep his head raised, to keep his eyes on her (so beautiful, even then; as beautiful as he’d hoped and feared). He struggled to keep his eyes open against the sweet lassitude of her hymn, to keep thinking.

The Scion. Where was the Scion?

He could not see it, but he could feel its response along the subtle link they shared, its words interjected into his own thoughts.

_She is beyond saving. This world is beyond saving. It is not too late to hearken to the purpose for which you were chosen, Our Eyes. She would not be lost to you then. You could be together. We could **all** be together._

It would be an alternative. A way out of this doomed situation. A way to stay together. _Be one with us and we will become one with all_ , the memory of Solarine whispered in her fever dreams, already infected and the both of them ignorant of it. All that time and he didn’t see, didn’t think to look beyond what seemed so innocuous.

 _Take me_ , her memory whispered again – another memory, another place, another time, another battle. Him the monster and she the sacrifice.  _Take me and let them go. Take me and we will be together._

Solarine pressing a kiss to his/its/Their eyeball-studded hand. Solarine caressing his/its/Their eyeless face. Solarine’s pain and fear and resolution and wrenching grief as her shadows surged to hold him/it/Them in place for the spear of blood and darkness that pierced his/its/Their chest.

Solarine’s resolution in the face of his/its/Their entreaties to give up, give in, ascend,  _join_.

Could he be as resolute as she once was?

_This need not be your end, Our Eyes. Join Us again. Be as we were **meant** to be._

His head fell back to the black stone. Even heavy-lidded he had to look away from the starlight brilliance she gathered in her hand. His eyes roamed the crimson nebula that haloed her winged glory, spreading across the black sky behind her like a pustulent bloodstain.

Above the spreading nebula, he saw a cluster of stars, burning impossibly amongst the dying suns. He’d never seen such a constellation before. An arc of stars like the leading edge of broad wings; the curve of a sinuous spine and tail; a bright eye and a crescent crown.

 _Embrace the Dream,_ a feminine voice whispered, far away. _It can save you._

“Solarine,” he said again, choking, gagging, tasting blood, not sure whether he was protesting or surrendering. “Solarine. Please. Don’t do this. Don’t leave me. Take me if you wish. Take me and we will be the most glorious, terrible thing to walk this realm in ten thousand years. Take me and we will be the bane of worlds the likes of which has not been seen since doom came to K'aresh.”

_Be the Dream. It can save you._

“Or come back with me. Come back with me to our little world and our little lives. Come back to your daughter and the new life we have made together. Come back and marry me. Marry me.”


	8. VIII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Illapa Proposes to a Girl and She Explodes

_Flicker_.

Something almost like a ripple emanated outward from Solarine’s ascended form at Illapa’s near-dying words, spoken in a blood-choked baritone that seemed so small, so quiet in the vastness of the expanding cosmos of her Nightmare.

The shuddering flicker that wracked that beautiful, terrible form caused her to gasp aloud, the first verbal sound she had made since their arrival in that place, and her fathomless eyes snapped open as she turned her face toward the constellation that shone so bright and so pure against the crimson backdrop that had clouded the once-beautiful vastness of open space.

That same crimson death still swirled about, even as a faint and familiar golden light tried so very hard to shine out from where her pupils had once been.

“S–” she whispered into the stars. “Save me.”

A few moments of endless silence passed, the tension in the air palpable, and then a note began to sing out through the blood-tinged darkness.

A hymn.

Solarine’s eyes remained wide open as she stared up into the sky, a ball of starlight still held in the palm of her hand, and the first resonance vibrations since Illapa had fallen and broken began to ring through the cold obsidian that now cradled his battered form.

It was a single, pure tone this time, resonating in every perfect octave at once, and it was the sound one heard when a single hair-cell inside the ear sang out its dying tone, slowly vibrating itself until it finally, inevitably, and permanently died.

Louder

and

LOUDER

and

_LOUDER_

it rang as the obsidian platform groaned and shuddered in the awful single-mindedness of that ceaseless, relentless hymn to the fabric of creation. Surely, Illapa was expecting a painful, merciless death, just as the angel had promised him, as his bruised and battered flesh bore the oscillations of the platform he lay upon as it neared the point where it would shatter just as he surely would.

 _CRACK_.

A single sound like the breaking of a piece of china echoed harshly, followed by a hundred more, and in an instant, Solarine exploded into ten thousand shards of pure, radiant light and tattered feathers, a blindingly radiant flash like radioactive material reaching criticality as it destroyed itself and everything around it.

Or, perhaps, only the part of the obsidian platform that had been encased, at the very last half-second, in a glowing, domed barrier.

He still heard that piercing tone even after it reached its deadly crescendo and shattered Solarine’s ascendant form into ten thousand radiant shards. It rang in his ears as tattered feathers fell like burning snow around him, their light dying.

He thought he would never hear anything else again. He thought he would never see anything else but that final image of her burned into his retinas, the way she flew apart into shards of light. An instant in time scarred into his eyes before the glowing barrier sprang up to contain her destructive final moment.

Perhaps the resonance had done something to his brain, as well. He thought he should feel more than this leaden numbness.

He couldn’t hear the Scion. Couldn’t hear the song. Couldn’t hear the way his own voice screamed and screamed and screamed inside his head.

With a final burst of effort, he managed to roll himself onto his stomach, and immediately vomited a gout of bright blood onto the scarred obsidian surface. He crawled on his belly through the blood and mangled feathers, one arm hoisting the rest of his dead weight along inch by painstaking inch.

A familiar soft, mournful sob drifted across the platform after a long, terrible silence punctuated only by the sound of Illapa vomiting into the feathers and debris that littered its surface.

This, though, was no echo, not like those that had guided them through the nightmare house in search of Solarine.

It was  _her_.

A gasp of painfully-drawn breath, and then another lurching, chest-wracking sob. She was there, buried somewhere in the center of a pile of charred feathers, shards of porcelain-like material that looked like the skin of her illusory form, and chips and dust made of sparkling black obsidian that glinted with all the colours reflecting down from the stars above – except crimson. Instead, a faint and gentle verdant glow bathed them as a certain constellation twinkled in the endless night of the void.

All things considered, crawling through a field of broken glass was easy compared everything that came before.

He inched through the sparkling grains of black glass that emulated the starry sky above, dragging a bloody furrow in his wake. He clumsily swept away bits of tattered feathers and shards of shattered porcelain, until finally, finally, his unsteady hand found soft ivory flesh.

He didn’t have the strength to rise, let alone hold her, so he found her lap and rested there – finally, finally. His body was heavy with the lassitude of her penultimate lullaby-song, the one that had nearly sung him to his rest.

Rest. Rest sounded good. The fingers that sought her hand glittered with obsidian dust, adhered to his skin by a sheen of sticky blood. “It’s alright,” he soothed, despite the fact that he was terribly close to dying in her arms. “Sshh, love. It’s alright.” He remembered the backlash of his own failed ascendancy, the strange wellspring of grief and loss and horror. “Ssshh. It’s alright.”

Soothing nothings, nonsense noise. There was little else to say.


	9. IX

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Which the Author Scrambles to Cover the Hole in the Narrative Where the Scion Was Supposed To Be

Even in their shattered state, bleeding and sobbing in the center of a pile of detritus, Solarine managed to lift one hand to rest it atop Illapa’s head as he rested it atop her nude lap. She was shivering, either with grief or with shock, as she twined her fingers through bloodied silver strands of hair.

And then, amidst the quiet sobs and shudders that ran through her now soft flesh, her skin began to glow, a faint but warm light enveloping her and then Illapa’s upper half.

It was a slow, incomplete mending, but the worst of the bleeding slowed to a drip, enough to buy them time before they either escaped or the Nightmare found its way back into the pocket dimension. She never quite stopped crying, though the shivers eventually abated and left just her hands to tremble and her teeth to chatter with each laboriously-drawn breath.

The gentle glow swelled and washed over Illapa. The tense, bloated pain of internal bleeding dulled as it slowed to a trickle; he gasped out a sob of sudden relief as a suite of broken bones realigned themselves. It was slow, incomplete, but he felt his mind clear and sharpen as his worst injuries mended.

Gingerly, he sat up, feeling all the still-pliant joins of spongy bone that had grown to fuse a multitude of fractures – but he managed to sit up and gather the naked, trembling priestess into his arms, holding her tight to his lean chest, offering (and perhaps taking) what shelter and comfort he could.

A flush of what could only have been guilt or shame flooded the Priestess’ cheeks, which had been sallow and bloodless, as that sound – a sob, so alien coming from Illapa, normally so resolute.

She opened her eyes, the sclera reddened and lashes clumped together with tears. Here, in her Dream, freed from the grip of Nightmare madness, the irises were the deep, pure azure blue of freshly-bloomed cornflowers. Solarine lifted a trembling hand and wrapped it around Illapa’s index finger, gingerly, as if afraid she might break it if she gripped it too tightly.

“I knew you would come,” she whispered hoarsely. “But I did not realise… I never finished the rites of ascension. It was incomplete, but I thought it would buy time…”

“It did,” Illapa said, his hands stroking her cheeks and hair as if to reassure himself of the shape of her, the familiar softness under his fingers. “Even if your judgment was clouded, you did what you had to do, and it bought time enough. To keep the Nightmare at bay just a little longer; to give us time to reach you.”

 _Us_. Her brilliant blue eyes widened up at him, and he turned his head to find the Scion standing there, as he had known intuitively it would be.

The creature stood a few lengths away, beyond their circle of verdant light. Compared to him, the monster was ivory and pristine, its flesh unstained by blood and ichor, its movements graceful and unburdened by pain and injury. It stood in the midst of the glittering rubble, turning a piece of sculpted porcelain over and over in its hands with a strange sort of melancholy. Even as they watched, the fragment crumbled away into white dust, slipping between the creature’s ivory fingers like sand through the neck of an hourglass.

“You–” Solarine’s soft, tear-choked voice began, but was immediately interrupted by a much harder, much deeper, and much more venomous voice.

“ _You_ ,” Illapa said, his eyes narrowed dangerously – still stained violet and indigo, their sclera flooded a solid crimson from burst blood vessels. “How  _dare_ you.” Bits of debris crunched beneath him as he tried to gather himself to stand, all the while internally cursing the half-healed body that struggled to obey his commands. “That was always your intention, to bring me here then abandon us, all so you could intervene with your ‘life-saving’ temptation.”

“Don’t,” Solarine gently interrupted his tirade, taking his face between her hands and turning it away from the monster, back to the gentle light of her clear blue gaze. “It was only trying to save you, in the only way it knows how.”

She continued, gently but firmly in her urging, before Illapa could speak again. "Perhaps you are correct in your judgment, but do not spend your energy on that in this moment. You need to save your strength until we return to our plane of existence.“ She looked up into the stars, then about at the utter ruin and devastation left in the wake of her failed, Nightmare-fueled ascension.

“This place is going to start falling apart. The magics I used to separate it from the rest will fade soon, and we must leave before that happens. I do not know what will become of us if we do not.”

“Our treachery has not gone unnoticed,” the Scion spoke, as though Illapa’s accusations and Solarine’s defense had fallen on deaf ears. “The power that encapsulated this place is unraveling.”

The monster’s head tilted on its slender neck, as though listening to a strain of music in a distant room.

And then a sound, deep beyond hearing, but felt in the bones and blood. A single heavy pulse, like a knock at a distant door. It ran through the platform beneath them, through the air around them, even through the stars above them, the entirety of that strange dimension shaken to its foundations. The pounding sounded again, louder, deeper, not fading away this time but drawing out into a low, creaking groan of strain as if the starry sky itself threatened to collapse on them.

“It is breaking through,” the Scion said.

“What?” Illapa demanded, despite the deep and dreadful knowledge of an answer he already knew. “What is?”

“The heart of corruption,” the Scion answered. “The close of the long circle. The herald of the coming end.”

It crossed the distance between them in a few regal steps; behind its ivory silhouette, the stars were going out, one by one, as the sky itself groaned in protest.

“It has seen us. It has  _foreseen_ us, and while you have done something unprecedented, you have done nothing to change what is to come. You know this, Our mortal aspect. You have been watching the signs; you have been listening to the turning of the song.”

It raised one eye-studded hand, stiletto-pointed fingers beckoning, drawing their attention up the gaunt, misshapen body to the blind planes of its face, to the solemn mouth and its dire words. “But hearken to what We say, Our Eyes: you have seen  _nothing_ like what is coming to this world. When the circle completes, when the torches are lit, when the keys turn, then you will reconsider the salvation We offer.”

Another dimension-shaking tremor reverberated through the starry void; another hundred suns went out, as though snuffed by the Scion’s bleak and terrible warnings. Illapa looked up into the half-face of his counterpart, and for the first time saw not a misbegotten creature, not the cast-off remains of a failed ascendancy – but a monster, a  _true_ monster, a living portent of stranger times. A divine beast saying, _come and see_.

And for once, he was speechless, the words stolen out of his throat.

As the dimension slowly collapsed under the incessant pressure of that unseen, incomprehensible presence, the Scion turned away. It flexed its hands, all four of them with their dagger-like fingers, then spun with all of the deceptive strength in its gaunt body. Its jagged fingertips sank into the fabric of the dreamscape around them, tearing through it in great furrows like it was the backdrop of a stage play. Space warped and billowed around the new wounds in the world, and Illapa clung to Solarine as they all fell through the rents the Scion tore in that dying reality.

They fell, through gray mist and crimson fog; and though he clutched Solarine tight to himself as they fell, cupped the back of her head with his hand and pressed her face tight to his chest, he could afford himself no such mercy.

He saw the great crimson  _thing_ that assailed her tiny, dying dream-world: a tumorous amalgamation of boneless appendages and gnashing mouths and a network of trailing, venous tissue that spread through the void beneath its leviathan mass. He saw the great, lidless eye, saw the tooth-lined pupil large enough to swallow him whole, saw the weight of vast, uncaring eons in its unblinking gaze.

He saw i


End file.
